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What Game Companies Want From Graduates
simoniker writes "Game education site Game Career Guide has a new feature talking to recruiters from notable game companies like EA, Insomniac Games, and THQ. They discuss the best university courses and qualifications for getting hired to be a game developer. EA's Colleen McCreary comments on the rise of some TV-advertised mass market game schools: 'Our concern with for-profit institutions is that students may not learn the fundamental tools for understanding and solving complex issues... We are most likely to hire someone who has a BFA or MFA from a traditional art college and a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science for our entry level artist and software engineer positions.'"
'Our concern with for-profit institutions is that students may not learn the fundamental the tools for understanding and solving complex issues,
Then don't hire people from vocational schools. Hire those who have excelled through self-learning and those who took the education seriously at an actual university. People who just jump into a cheap vocational school do so because they either don't have the patience or qualifications to attend a university or the self-determination and drive to become self-educated. They're like all the people who jumped into IT a decade ago and ruined the market and the reputation, because it went from being a place for people who enjoyed technology and were thrilled to make a living at it to people who jumped into it because they needed to feed their five kids and they heard it paid more than teaching or digging ditches.
I want my time and bandwidth back. The article is basically four pages of corporate recruiter speak that makes me want to hit someone in the head with blunt implement.
"Bring your A game" indeed. Why don't I synergistically ping my cheese with your bandwidth while I'm at it?
people who don't know what overtime is.
I slave full time but still study for a BSc part time and, as I've been at the school for longer than your average undergraduate, know quite a few PhDs, Professors, and the like.
They all have such a drive for their research. All they want to do is conquer their current topic of research and make scientific progress. I cannot imagine any of them wanting a job like this (EA's treatment of staff, namely 80 hour weeks with no overtime pay, aside).
If you're not already in the industry, you don't get into the industry.
God spoke to me.
The wants of the major studios are pretty simple.
They want programmers who already know whichever technology they happen to be using on the current project. Kids who are willing to work 80 hours a week and don't cost them any real training time. By the time technology changes the title will have shipped, the coders will be burnt out, and they can be replaced with fresh grads so no raises are required.
They want masters or phd students in computer science willing to work in entry level positions. Someone to bring them new technology and ideas without spending time on R&D or even staying current with academic research or other industries.
They want to very best artists they can find. Provided these artists already know how to create content in their format of choice, have a portfolio that matches the style of the game, and are willing to work just as long as the programmers.
What they do not want, and usually can not afford, is to actually train, research, or develop innovation in house.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Each person in that class should have encouraged to start there own business.
They should be in business school if they want to do that now shouldn't they be?
Almost noone knows the 'ugly details' of any industry they want to go in when they enter college.
I never said ugly details, I said they dont have an understanding on what it takes to make a game. An ugly detail would be something like crunch time or something, not and understanding of the industry you want to work in.
The best way to get a job in the gaming industry is through social networking.
True
"You cannot do that unless you work for the company first and I guarantee they are not looking for a 22 year old kid to contribute to their game design outside of maybe beta feedback."
or Harvard business majors.
Want to make key decsions? be a business major.
However,, I like the start your own business approach myself. Just wish someone had taught me that 25 years ago. What the... they should be business majors then? TFA is about game design/related degrees. You are so scattered with your reply... Game design students should start their own business blah blah
You should start with a point and reinforce with details to get the point across. Ranting or whatever this was certainly did not cut it. I know it comes across negative, it probably is, but it is more of a tip for future discussions.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
I've seen this problem myself, you get the for-profit colleges promising the world and more to a few kids who don't know the first thing when it comes to developing games. I'm attending one myself, and in our very first quarter we had tons of people, who hadn't the slightest clue. Myself and another classmates came from a modding background, so we had a good idea of what we were getting into. We have lost beyond 50% of our initial classmates as the quarters roll by (now about halfway). The students who came after us are no better. Game companies don't really have to worry, the people who don't know what it takes are generally filtered out in the three years or so it takes to get a degree, or if they do graduate, they will stand out amongst their classmates. If an employer is competent, they'll be able to see past the garbage. The problem is actually in modding too - how many times do you see people in mod sites talk about an awesome mod (so awesome, he can't tell you specifics) ask for a massive team to do all the work and just listen to him? Yes, these projects die, fail, crash and burn, and so do people in game programs who don't know what they're getting into.
But EA told me that it's standard in the industry for employee contracts to be signed in goat's blood!
I've never worked for a game company, but I hear that all they do is work overtime. I think that the gaming industry has some enormous problems in the management hierarchy and that is where the problems come (leading to game delays, etc etc).
the Political Inquirer
What he said makes sense to me. If you want to make a specific game, start a company. Big games are expensive and no established company is going to let a person fresh out of school do anything important like design their next game. Therefore, if you have a very specific game in mind, your best bet on getting it made is to start a company.
Maybe not
Hold on a second the snippet above left out a very important line. Sure it quoted:
"We are most likely to hire someone who has a BFA or MFA from a traditional art college and a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science for our entry level artist and software engineer positions."
But not the line right after:
On the other hand, Baker comments that although "the idea of 'Game Schools' is still a relatively new aspect to the industry" which leaves the answer to whether they provide enough relevant experience a little "unclear" she feels that "schools like Guildhall [at SMU] and Full Sail have merit."
Honestly with the Bias that many traditional school graduates have against these schools and the type of discussion that this type of article starts, this is a very important thing to leave out. The snippet that was pulled out implies a completely different perception of these schools by the industry then the article describes.
I work for a large game development studio. The slave labor approach only works for low innovation products. There are definitely studios that make those sorts of games, but even with aggressive overtime an inexperienced workforce will never return a superior value:cost ratio to warrant such an approach. We just finished managing a team of over a 100 people. We were trying to innovate, but such a large team made us too slow. Every new junior person we added after about 80 people probably lowered the overall quality of the product due to the increased communication overhead. Management in many development studios know this and are trying to make their teams more effective.
As it relates to "what developers want": We want smart people who like video games. We'll pay them well and send them home at 6pm. Slave labor studios will continue to exist, but innovative studios are on the rise and hiring aggressively. Ubisoft and Vivendi are two that come to mind.
If you didn't go to school, but you are energetic, disciplined and passionate, apply for QA roles and then commit to understanding the mechanics you see when you are testing. I know an Executive Producer of an extremely successful 2006 game that started in QA and absorbed the processes he saw around himself. He moved into design years later and applied this knowledge while absorbing process from new disciplines around him. Then he was a respected Producer for years, mainly because he understood what it took to get things done in each area. Most recently he applies all of this with a talented team and makes a great game.
Even young punks who think they know it all can grow up in QA. It is quite an eye-opener for these know-it-alls to be around disciplined, confident CompSci graduates who really do know their stuff. They often mature during this process can move onto more responsibility. The ones that don't are easy to spot.
If you have the education, the only thing that you need if you are missing experience in the games industry is modesty and passion. Modesty to work on the boring systems, and passion to make those seem exciting. The industry really needs more candidates. We routinely hire talent from other countries because we don't get enough local resumes.
Except that's traceable to management failures again. Lemme see:
1. First and foremost, the games industry doesn't even try to keep talent. Last I've heard, they have a burnout rate of about 5 years. They basically take the cheapest (which sometimes doesn't mean the most talented) graduates available, overwork and underpay them, then they burn out and move to other jobs, and a fresh new batch is hired.
I'm sorry, but then don't wonder why the architectures are bad, non-scalable and extremely hard to modify or maintain. Sad to say, and that's from a college graduate, college and coding small cool stuff in your free time teaches all the bad habits and none of the good practices. You come out of college having worked only on _tiny_ projects, individually or in 2-3 person teams, and with requirements that are fixed, clear and never changing.
The funny thing is: a program of 1000 lines, you can hold completely in your head. You don't even need test cases to tell you what you'll break by changing this or that, but even that's ok, because you won't have to change anything ever in an assignment. Plus, the scope is always simple enough so it either works or it doesn't, and you can manually prove one or the other in 5 minutes. (E.g., if your assignment is a heap sort, wth, you can just type in some numbers and see if they come out sorted. Why would you bother with a unit test for that?) You don't even need a good architecture or clear interfaces, because again, you'll never have to re-discover what it does or ever have to change it. It's always by definition write-only, so it's OK to write write-only code. Even 10,000 lines, if you're reasonably smart, you can do it. And that's already more code than in _any_ college assignement ever.
Move on to the real life and a 1,000,000 line project (which is actually a small one), and all the cool write-only hacks and the "it'll be manually tested at the end anyway" mentality you learned in college become a liability. You have to actually unlearn all the write-only habits that college taught you, and learn how to actually produce quality code.
Except in the game industry, by that time you've been overworked and underpaid to death, and the original enthusiams has worn off. You may have started with "woohoo, I'm coding cool stuff for the next great game, I'm so much cooler than those boring guys writing boring VB programs for a living", but in a few years you get to the point of, "fuck this shit, I could be writing one of those boring VB programs for twice the money and a tiny fraction of the unpaid overtime, if any." So you move on. And all that experience is lost to the industry, who then proceeds to hire another fresh enthusiast and watch him do "cool" unmaintainable hacks, and spend half a year introducing two new bugs for every bug fixed.
I'm sorry, but failure to retain talent and experience, _is_ a management failure. You can't just point the finger at the programmers and say "bah, it's those guys writing bad code", when that's the guys you've hired. And in fact, when you just got rid of those who had just learned how to do a better job. It's like buying an old Yugo and then complaining that it's not a race car. Well, that's the car _you_ bought.
2. I'm sorry, but if you pressure people into holding unrealistic deadlines and into working 80 hours a week, don't be surprised if they produce worse code. People (A) make more mistakes when they're tired, and (B) tend to do the quickest dirty hack when it's either that or working yet another Sunday. Writing well structured, scalable and maintainable code takes more hours than writing the quickest hack. Except usually noone gives you a deadline where you have the luxury to do the former. So if you want to do a good architecture, those hours will come o
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm a lead server developer at a MMOG company in the Bay Area. What do we want? We want talented programmers. If you can hack it, then education, experience, resume, all that crap is immaterial. The most important stuff you have to teach yourself. Learn what's out there, play with it, use it, fix it, rewrite it. If you know it, the job is yours. And by job, I mean that literally, since we're actively hiring. I'm not very hard to find.